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Was just reviewing some photos from the SSC pages on the Rio Closing, and mon Dieu!, have never seen so MANY Category A seats empty (and I don't mean the seats reserved for the athletes). Did Rio 2016 overprice the "A" seats so that so many were empty? (I know the section on the right seems to be a Press Section, but even that, why is it so blatantly unfilled?

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Was just reviewing some photos from the SSC pages on the Rio Closing, and mon Dieu!, have never seen so MANY Category A seats empty (and I don't mean the seats reserved for the athletes). Did Rio 2016 overprice the "A" seats so that so many were empty? (I know the section on the right seems to be a Press Section, but even that, why is it so blatantly unfilled?

One factor which was apparent on the night, but perhaps not so obvious on TV as in real life, was the weather. Here's a quote from a BBC liveblog:

Ah so. Then maybe they should've gone with the alternate "Storm" scenario, i.e., showing how the Brasilian parrots and fauna and flora cope in a rainstorm-- and the show would still have been well attended, in sync with the elements, and a smasheroo!! But then again, they didn't ask me.

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Ah so. Then maybe they should've gone with the alternate "Storm" scenario, i.e., showing how the Brasilian parrots and fauna and flora cope in a rainstorm-- and the show would still have been well attended, in sync with the elements, and a smasheroo!! But then again, they didn't ask me.

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Am rewatching the 2016 Opening. Why is Santos-Dumont's plane flying backwards (i.e., the part with the wings is behind)? Am I missing something? Can someone please explain this to me? (Also, the actual flying over Rio, I guess, was previously shot separately??)

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Am rewatching the 2016 Opening. Why is Santos-Dumont's plane flying backwards (i.e., the part with the wings is behind)? Am I missing something? Can someone please explain this to me? (Also, the actual flying over Rio, I guess, was previously shot separately??)

It's a canard. You can see versions of the same configuration (large rear wings, small front wing/flap thing) on contemporary military jets.

Yes, the flying over Rio would have to have been greenscreened earlier. The show aircraft simply hung around under the roof looking awkward.

He saw his aviation technology utilized in Brazil’s Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, in which an estimated 3,000 Brazilians died. Devastated by the fact that his life’s work was used in warfare, Santos-Dumont committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 59. Today he is buried in Rio’s Cemitério de São João Batista, alongside the likes of Carmen Miranda and Tom Jobin. Santos-Dumont was also almost certainly gay; he never married and many articles about him from his lifetime alluded to his homosexuality. However, Brazilian canon often glosses over that fact as if it were at odds with his scientific achievements. “We all known that Santos-Dumont was gay, but no one says it,” says Dutch authorArthur Japin, who fictionalized Santos-Dumont’s life in his 2015 novelDe Gevleugelde (translated asO homem com asasin Portuguese).

Comparing it with the Olympic Channel Full HD version on YouTube (checked against the BBC coverage in case it was a later edit), I found something truly remarkable. The stadium screens showed a clock display, starting at 5 minutes before the official ceremony kickoff: but on the "live" coverage of the stadium from the air we saw that begin on the screens (too small to read) a mere 50 seconds before kickoff. Not only that, at the beginning of the Full HD version, we can faintly hear Ban Ki-Moon calling for an Olympic Truce- but what we see in the stadium is the earlier pre-show audience participation practice. Then at about 3 minutes 30 seconds into the Full HD version, we seem to hear booing, which quickly ends. On OF2028's version we hear the spectators chanting along with the final 10-second countdown, but on the "live" Full HD and BBC versions, we hear only the last 3 numbers or so.

In other words, organisers were so scared of what might happen when "interim President" Temer arrived in the stadium, they first built a delay of over 4 minutes into the video feed, and then when he arrived and people started booing and chanting "Fora Temer" they also began feeding generic crowd noises (possibly from the dress rehearsals) into the soundtrack. They didn't switch to genuine "as near live as makes very little difference" coverage, with synchronised sound and vision, until about five seconds before the show started !

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/\ Another thing which one can just imagine or glean from the Official OC version is . .. what happened to that huge "Forest Canopy" device after it was used? First off, it arose from the floor of the field. And then, when they were done with it, you just never saw it again.

How was it disposed of?

So the cameras very expertly cut away from the whole thing collapsing and then just being dragged off to one side in order for the "Arrivals" section to move in. That's my guess of how they disposed of it quickly.

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/\ Another thing which one can just imagine or glean from the Official OC version is . .. what happened to that huge "Forest Canopy" device after it was used? First off, it arose from the floor of the field. And then, when they were done with it, you just never saw it again.

How was it disposed of?

So the cameras very expertly cut away from the whole thing collapsing and then just being dragged off to one side in order for the "Arrivals" section to move in. That's my guess of how they disposed of it quickly.

Yes. If you look at the last few seconds of OlympicFlame2028's video 46, you can see the cast of the jungle segment moving to gather in the lowered net: